New York, NY (June 10, 2020)—Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds recently re-recorded his 1996 Grammy-nominated song, “How Come, How Long,” acoustically for an Instagram video paying tribute to George Floyd, who was killed by police during an arrest in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CAyAvpep0bZ/?igshid=r2yxs4sj9400
Grammy award-winning recording engineer Paul Boutin (Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton, Pharrell Williams) used a Shure KSM353/ED microphone and a CEntrance MixerFace portable audio interface to capture Edmonds’ guitar and vocals in one take.
A mobile mixer, recorder and USB audio interface, the handheld MixerFace sports built-in XY microphones, although Boutin opted to employ the Shure bi-directional ribbon microphone instead.
The posted song was a reworking of Edmonds’ Nineties duet with Stevie Wonder, who also co-wrote the track. A Top-10 hit in the U.K., the song went on to be nominated twice for the Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals Grammy Award, first in 1998 for its original version, and then the following year for a live version that appeared on Babyface’s Unplugged album. While the full song deals with a woman who suffers domestic violence, the Instagram version focuses solely on the emotional chorus, adding a new facet to the lyrics.
CEntrance Debuts MixerFace R4B Stereo Recorder
Posted on May 29, 2020, the video has amassed more than 400,000 views at presstime, but the moving clip wasn’t the first time Boutin had put a MixerFace to the test for the artist’s live streams, having just used it days earlier for Babyface’s Waiting to Exhale online event, where the artist/producer broke down various songs on the soundtrack that he produced 25 years ago.
“I used the cute, little MixerFace for Kenny’s Waiting to Exhale music event with guest star Toni Braxton,” said Boutin. “Everything sounded so much better through the MixerFace than all those other ones I tried; it was so very clean. MixerFace is definitely a pro product. I plan to use it on all the upcoming live streams and even Instagram recordings we do straight to video that I engineer for Kenny.”
CEntrance • https://centrance.com
Shure • www.shure.com
